Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Until they do, these older and less-educated people (mainly white men) may not respect the benign taboos on racism, sexism, and homophobia that have become second nature to the mainstream, and may even dismiss them as “political correctness.” Today they can find each other on the Internet and coalesce under a demagogue. As we will see in chapter 20, Trump’s success, like that of right-wing populists in other Western countries, is better understood as the mobilization of an aggrieved and shrinking demographic in a polarized political landscape than as the sudden reversal of a century-long movement toward equal rights.

Progress in equal rights may be seen not just in political milestones and opinion bellwethers but in data on people’s lives. Among African Americans, the poverty rate fell from 55 percent in 1960 to 27.6 percent in 2011.¹⁴ Life expectancy rose from 33 in 1900 (17.6 years below that of whites) to 75.6 years in 2015 (less than 3 years below whites).¹⁵ African Americans who make it to 65 have longer lives ahead of them than white Americans of the same age. The rate of illiteracy fell among African Americans from 45 percent in 1900 to effectively zero percent today.¹⁶ As we will see in the next chapter, the racial gap in children’s readiness for school has been shrinking. As we will see in chapter 18, so has the racial gap in happiness.¹⁷

Racist violence against African Americans, once a regular occurrence in night raids and lynchings (three a week at the turn of the 20th century), plummeted in the 20th century, and has fallen further since the FBI started amalgamating reports on hate crimes in 1996, as figure 15-1 shows. (Very few of these crimes are homicides, in most years one or zero.)¹⁸ The slight uptick in 2015 (the most recent year available) cannot be blamed on Trump, since it parallels the uptick in violent crime that year (see figure 12-2), and hate crimes track rates of overall lawlessness more closely than they do remarks by politicians.¹⁹

Figure 15-3 shows that hate crimes against Asian, Jewish, and white targets have declined as well. And despite claims that Islamophobia has become rampant in America, hate crimes targeting Muslims have shown little change other than a one-time rise following 9/11 and upticks following other Islamist terror attacks, such as the ones in Paris and San Bernardino in 2015.²⁰ At the time of this writing, FBI data from 2016 are not available, so it’s premature to accept the widespread claims of a Trumpist surge in hate crimes that year. The claims come from advocacy organizations, whose funding depends on whipping up fear, rather than disinterested recordkeepers; some of the incidents were ironic hoaxes, and many were boorish outbursts rather than actual crimes.²¹ Aside from post-terrorist and crime-related blips, the trend in hate crimes is downward.

Figure 15-3: Hate crimes, US, 1996–2015

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation 2016b. The arrow points to 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 7–4 of Pinker 2011.

Women’s status, too, is ascendant. As recently as my childhood, American women in most states could not take out a loan or credit card in their own names, had to look for jobs in the HELP WANTED—FEMALE section of the classified ads, and could not press charges of rape against their husbands.²² Today, women make up 47 percent of the labor force and a majority of university students.²³ Violence against women is best measured by victimization surveys, because they circumvent the problem of underreporting to the police; these instruments show that rates of rape and violence against wives and girlfriends have been sinking for decades and are now at a quarter or less of their peaks in the past (figure 15-4).²⁴ Too many of these crimes still take place, but we should be encouraged by the fact that a heightened concern about violence against women is not futile moralizing but has brought measurable progress—which means that continuing this concern can lead to greater progress still.

No form of progress is inevitable, but the historical erosion of racism, sexism, and homophobia are more than a change in fashion. As we will see, it seems to be pushed along by the tide of modernity. In a cosmopolitan society, people rub shoulders, do business, and find themselves in the same boat with other kinds of people, and that tends to make them more sympathetic to one another.²⁵ Also, as people are forced to justify the way they treat other people, rather than dominating them out of instinctive, religious, or historical inertia, any justification for prejudicial treatment will crumble under scrutiny.²⁶ Racial segregation, male-only suffrage, and the criminalization of homosexuality are literally indefensible: people tried to defend them in their times, and they lost the argument.

Figure 15-4: Rape and domestic violence, US, 1993–2014